I don’t know what everyone means when they use ‘rule’ in the title and at this point I’m too afraid to ask. Please enlighten me.

  • OpenStars@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    Thank you for explaining this.

    I don’t know what some people were assuming that I meant, but ofc I mean that I was browsing the “All” feed (what else could I have meant? well, I suppose “New” also, and ngl I do switch back and forth between those two, though spend >98% of my time on “All”), and that I wanted something in-between having to subscribe to each and every single thing individually, vs. EVERYTHING (with like a ton of sports, it used to be a bunch of foreign-language communities - which is… fine, I don’t begrudge most any non-illegal community its entire existence? - and cooking, etc.).

    My own “Local” barely has anything, so perhaps that is a source of bias - StarTrek.Online has roughly 2 posts per day, if that; and Discuss.Online where I was previously was the same; and Kbin.Social where I was before that literally has no Local mode at all iirc!

    Anyway, to clarify, what I want is to start with inclusivity, then begin narrowing it down a bit - and all the better would be to use a toggle rather than a full ban, or even just limit the frequency of things so that e.g. I do not see 4 different posts about cooking from 4 different cooking communities in a row, followed by 4 different sports, followed by knitting, followed by… well, anyway, I just am not interested in scrolling endlessly to find even one thing that interests me, that way. This way I actually find TONS more posts than starting with exclusivity and trying to work upwards from that. (ironically, at the same time, it also misses many posts compared to visiting each community itself, but they tend to be the lowest-upvoted and commented-on ones; so anyway, it is what it is)

    But for some reason, most people here that are choosing to respond are arguing against that, citing how it “won’t work” (I mean… I already do it, literally daily, and have been for months?), as if I am somehow trying to take something away from them, somehow, but I am just talking about curating my own personal feed, which works for me, until we can get something better going on.

    Also, there is the potential to be even more inclusive if the user has stipulated that they have a particular preference, when a community is new and struggles to gain acceptance in the wider Fediverse, the way that I am talking about. e.g. if someone says that they enjoy sports, and a new baseball community emerges, then it could be helpful to show up less often for people that do not like sports at all, but conversely more often for people who have indicated that they do - even if they have not subscribed to it yet. Sort of like how targeted ads work, except not being driven by seeking profits, and instead seeking out a genuine connection between a user and what content type they have asked to be notified about.

    Well, it’s fun to dream. :-)

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I get what you’re saying. What you are describing is the core fundamental idea behind, what is now, almost derogatorily called “the algorithm”.

      It’s great, in concept, to implement such a system, right up until someone decides to change the way it chooses what you see for the benefit of advertisers… Which is pretty much what’s happened to every social media network, and to some extent, Google searches… Someone decided to cram what was essentially an ad into everyone’s faces by manipulating the algorithm, and not “SEO” is being weaponized against the users. SEO as a concept is a way to effectively manipulate the selection algorithm to artificially push your content to the top. It’s not a new concept, which is why there are still companies called “AZ construction” and other related names; those business names were largely popular due to the phone book (aka “yellow pages”) so when going down the list of companies for a product or service you need, they would be the first name you saw, simply because the phone book was sorted alphabetically.

      The enshittification of all of that is exactly the same reason so many of us abandoned Reddit.

      Algorithms, great idea, horrible in practice.